Read Online All the Wild Children by Josh Stallings - Free Book Online

running, free.
    The man puts his shoulder to the door. 
    Lark is pushing back, calling me.  “Josh!  I can’t... you have..”  He is straining.
    The man is shocked when I slam my body into the door.  He stumbles back.  The door closes.  Lark slams the bolt home.
    “Back door!  Run!”
    We run through the house.  Out the siding glass door.  There is a three foot path and then a steep brush covered slope.  We are flying for a moment, our momentum takes us out, gravity pulls us down.  I hit a manzanita plant, tearing my jeans and scratching my face.  I don’t care.  We are rolling, getting up and running.  We bash our way through the brush and onto a footpath. 
    When we get to the cabin, Ron the renter is sitting on his porch, smoking a pipe and softly strumming his guitar.  He looks up smiling, the wild Stallings boys are at it again.  Then he sees our eyes, our fear.  And he is up and moving.  We tell him about the creepy guy.  Ron doesn’t question us.  He believes us.  He is rare.
     
    We are sitting in our living room, the creepy old guy is spinning a cap gun drunkenly, trying to tell us he had been in a John Wayne movie once.  Ron stands between us and him.  We are waiting for the police.  I watch the old drunk and wonder if I got it wrong.  Maybe he was a harmless drunk looking for a soft place to fall. 
    The drunk old man looks at me out of the back of the police car as they drive away. 
    He is handcuffed.  He is on his way to jail.  He is a wanted man.  He is a pedophile.
     
    I am 50, and I wonder what those boys were doing alone in that house. 
    I am 9, and I’m proud of myself and my brother.  The boogie man came a hunting and we sent him away in cuffs.  We survived.  Stallings boys 1, boogie man 0.

IF YOU CAN’T BE SAFE, BE FIERCE - PART TWO
     
    1975, it is three in the morning, Lark and I have climbed a power line tower.  We are more than a hundred feet off the ground.  High voltage is crackling like black cat firecrackers over our heads.  Our hands are wrapped around steel beams.  Our feet dangle into space.  We are doing pull ups.  We are alive.
     
    Lark and I are hooligans.
    I am 9.  Lark is 11.  He thinks he is a badass.  So do I.
    “Try an stick me with the knife.”
    “No, I don’t wanna.”
    “Do it dude, I’ve been practicing tae kwon do.”
    “No.”
    “Come on, just try.”  Lark has placed the knife in my hand.
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Do it.”
    I do and the blade sinks a half inch into the fat over his heart. 
    “Fuck dude!”
    “You told me to.”
    “Fuck!”  The babysitter opens the door.  She sees my brother, she sees the knife in his chest.  She starts to scream.  Lark pulls it out, barely any blood.  No biggy.  I’ve seen worse falling off a bike. 
    “What is wrong with you boys?”  The babysitter is yelling.  We are laughing now.  She never comes back.
     
    Forgetting the histrionics, hers was a valid question.  What was wrong with us?  Fucked if I know.  I stumble in the dark looking at symptoms and hope they will lead me to a root cause, name it and own it and let it go.  I’m no closer so I keep prospecting.
     
    There is a picture of me at 5 years old, sitting on my father’s lap.  My strawberry blonde hair is wild and tousled around my face.  My brother is turned away, all you can see is his freshly shorn head.  Dad has a tight crew cut.  Once a month my mother rounds us up and clips our nails and runs a trimmer over our heads.  On haircut Saturday I would hide in the woods all day.  It wasn’t some deep desire to have long or short hair and nails.  No.  It was a need even then to have control over my body.
     
    I am 11, my Mother sends me to an orthodontist.  I don’t want to go.  This battle with her and me goes all the way back to the womb. 
    The orthodontist grinds my sharp canines down.  He doesn’t ask my opinion.  He doesn’t warn me he will grind them.  If he had I would have